An Irish director casts a British woman and an American star in the — thus — quintessentially Canadian film about a national treasure, Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis.
As a woman and as an artist Maud is a heroically resilient figure. She survives life with a brutish husband, accepting a succession of indignities, some outrageous. Gradually she establishes her own rights, identity and even name. Though crippled with arthritis, Maud becomes a famous and esteemed artist. (Now you can add “expensive” — those little five-dollar painted boards go for $9,000 at the gallery.)
As her craft advances, her domestic status improves. Husband Everett gradually assumes the Womans Work — sweeping, peeling, darning — so she can earn money with her art.
Maud’s art is gloriously naive. It springs from her wistful imagination more than from her actual environs. It’s the triumph of spirit over perception. If it’s representational it represents the figures teeming in her imagination not those actually outside and around.
In rough parallel, she stays with vile Everett because she sees more in him, a softer self, than not only we see but that he himself doesn’t sense. She dies knowing he loved her — despite his never having said anything like that, or shown it, or indeed ever acknowledging it even to himself.
But the feeling does out, even if it’s in the subtle shift from her walking behind him on the horizon line to him pushing her in his wheelbarrow. Love takes many forms. As does art. And marriage.
Perhaps Everett’s most loving act is taking her to espy her daughter, whom Maud’s family took away and sold, telling her the baby had been deformed and died.
The film’s dominant palette is the grey gloom of cramped unlit interiors and a hard scrabble, penurious life. The fish seller makes so little that five cents for a painted card becomes a windfall.
The point about that unrelieved darkness is Maud’s response to it: flowers and animals painted in bright, unmodulated colours, a brilliance that her crippled hand uses to express her indomitable, spirited soul. Because she has spent her life in the shadows — from the shame of a humiliating pregnancy and helplessness to Everett’s abused cleaner — she finds in art the joy and brightness of life. It proves contagious.
The point about that unrelieved darkness is Maud’s response to it: flowers and animals painted in bright, unmodulated colours, a brilliance that her crippled hand uses to express her indomitable, spirited soul. Because she has spent her life in the shadows — from the shame of a humiliating pregnancy and helplessness to Everett’s abused cleaner — she finds in art the joy and brightness of life. It proves contagious.
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